WHAT happens when the medium becomes the message is the concern of fiction this summer.
In Séamas O’Reilly’s Prestige Drama (Fleet, £14.99 (£13.49); 978-0-349-72789-9), the city of Derry is faced with confronting its violent past through the lens of a Netflix-style multi-episode drama. From different character viewpoints, O’Reilly skewers American actors trying to do a north-west-Irish accent, “the same legacy-approved fourteen-song playlist of punk rock songs to which every film distributor long ago seized the rights”, and positioning of the Troubles as “colourful backdrop to the universal drama of picking up a guitar in search of three chords and the truth”.
Hollywood’s penchant for rehab is dismissed as: “Sure there’s nuns in Derry drinks more than these fluthers.” Wit jostles with pain as we learn “a greater gossip than Eileen Downey never put her arm through a coat.” Yet the bereaved mother Ann Marie, whose son Jamie was shot by a British soldier, finds acid wit marinated her anger over the decades: “I want justice and I want peace but I have never wanted to forgive.”
Ann Marie’s story will be the centre of the imminent filming. But the sudden disappearance of the lead actor Monica Logue, playing the grieving mother, could be a silver lining, allowing Derry’s community to tell their own version of their story, for maybe the last time.
Transcription by Ben Lerner (Granta, £14.99 (£13.49); 978-1-80351-380-5) is excruciating and brilliant by turns. A nameless writer returns to his university town to interview his 90-year-old mentor, Thomas, and drops his iPhone in the bathroom sink, rendering it useless. Together with the narrator, we are plunged into the alternative universe of having to be fully present, without the scaffolding-cum-distraction of mobile phones.
In Thomas’s decaying home, the writer and mentor riff on memory and dream, the narration drifting off to the writer’s less than happy relationship with his wife, Mia, whom he met at university. The story swings between the couple’s present issues with their school-refusing, anxious daughter, Eva, betrayals from the past, and the encounter with Thomas. Everything feels unmoored without ever-present technology to record, encode, and enshrine every human interaction. “I was glitching, craving my cellular phone on a cellular level,” declares the narrator, and so are we.
Another nameless narrator guides us through life at a contemporary American boarding school in Avigayl Sharp’s Offseason (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, £18.99 (£17.09); 978-1-3996-3700-8). The literature teacher’s technology-loving students struggle with long novels or, indeed, speaking in class discussions, the utterance of three sentences causing one student to “let her head drop back against the window, exhausted from the effort of speech”.
Challenged by fading friendships, addiction to prescription stimulants, and a complicated East European Jewish family history, the 28-year-old protagonist has to find a way of telling her own story, free of the clichés of neurotic immigrant-experience fiction, so temptingly close at hand.
Susan Gray writes about the arts and entertainment for The Daily Telegraph, The Sunday Times, and the Daily Mail.